Mark Gergen in the news:

UC Berkeley School of Law professor Mark Gergen also said that there is an enormous number of construction litigation claims, although he said the central focus of future investigations will likely concern the degree to which the company is responsible for taking precautions against damages.

According to UC Berkeley School of Law professor Mark Gergen, the city will likely revisit its housing code as a result of the balcony collapse. There may be new ordinances or other provisions passed in order to prevent further incidents. Gergen said the victims’ families could have grounds for multiple lawsuits.

The proposed carbon tax is a much better mechanism for making those who burn fossil fuels pay for the privilege of doing so. The carbon tax is more transparent, specifying the sums that must be paid for the privilege of emitting greenhouse gases. And unlike cap and trade’s auction proceeds, revenue from a carbon tax can be returned to Californians through direct tax relief.

Mark Gergen, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, said he did not know of any previous litigation in California over whether rewards should be paid if the suspect dies before conviction…. “Looking beneath the surface, in many of these cases there are qualms about whether the person claiming the reward really played an instrumental role,” he said.

Mark Gergen, a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Law who studies federal income tax and tax shelters, questioned the value of publicly humiliating tax debtors when many do not have the means to pay their debt. “I suspect a lot of these companies are beyond despair. Some of them simply can’t pay,” Gergen said. “If somebody goes bankrupt, they are already embarrassed. If you want to have this public disclosure as a way of embarrassing people, you aren’t doing a big service by adding them to this list.”

The near-blanket cancellation of the contracts raises the question of whether Chesapeake ever intended to pay if it failed to find oil or gas immediately, says Mark Gergen, a contract law professor at the University of California-Berkeley law school.

Mark Gergen, a tax law professor at the UC Berkeley School of Law, says he’s not aware of any previous cases that would resolve whether a state can “impose an information reporting requirement on a foreign merchant if there is insufficient nexus to require the merchant to collect and remit a use tax.” It’s “difficult to predict how a court would come out on the question,” Gergen says.

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